It is another busy year for the GenealogyBank team as we continue to rapidly grow our online archives to offer you the best U.S. newspaper coverage for your genealogy research. We are pleased to announce that we recently added more back issues and articles to more than 3,000 newspapers from all 50 U.S. states! Now you can enjoy even more content to investigate your family history with our expanded newspaper coverage across the entire United States.

It would be too lengthy to list them all, but here is a partial list of the new newspapers we added, and the expansion to some of our existing titles: over 60 newspapers from 11 states. This gives you just a taste of the rapid growth of GenealogyBank’s online U.S. newspaper archives!

In fact, we are adding more newspapers right now, as we do each and every day to help you do better genealogy research.

Fort Johnson in South Carolina was no different from Army bases across the country. From time to time soldiers deserted, as these men did on 3 January 1810. Captain A.B. Armistead wanted them back—and so he ran a newspaper ad offering “ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD for six Deserters, who deserted from this post on the 3d instant” and promising to pay “all expenses.”

Charles Merul was “a native of South-Carolina, twenty three years of age, five feet ten inches high, has light complexion and dark hair; went off in citizens clothes”

Daniel Holloway was “a native of Virginia, twenty three years of age, five feet nine inches high, has fair complexion, blue eyes, and dark hair”

John Wynne “was born in Georgia”; the ad gives a physical description of him, but the key identifiers were the pistols he was carrying, described as: “uncommon, particularly with respect to the locks and the fixing of the ramrod”

Old newspaper reward ads like this one, published in an attempt to reclaim military deserters, can be rich sources of genealogical information—often providing the names, origins, ages and physical descriptions of the missing soldiers. Historical newspapers had all the news of the day. Every day I am surprised by what I find doing genealogy research in the archives!

GenealogyBank has put another 3,334 back issues of the Charleston News and Courier online. These issues span the years 1895-1910. Wow—this is great historical news coverage for genealogists researching their southern roots from South Carolina! Explore thousands more historical SC newspaper articles to help you explore your family history from “The Palmetto State.”

The clipping below shows old photo illustrations that were common in newspapers from the American Progressive Era. These historical picture sketches are fantastic because they can provide your family with a look at your early ancestors long before personal cameras became commonplace.

The News and Courier (Charleston, South Carolina), 1 January 1900, page 1

Every day we are building in more and more of the core data that genealogists rely on.

Find the details that will give you the stories of your ancestors’ lives.

In the next few weeks GenealogyBank will be adding even more newspapers to its vast online historical newspaper archives, which currently contain more than 6,400 titles and over 1.25 billion articles—including more than 215 million obituaries.

Here is a list of the newspaper titles and date ranges that will be added from seven states: Illinois, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, and Virginia—plus the District of Columbia.

In the next few weeks GenealogyBank will be adding even more newspapers to its vast online historical newspaper archives, which currently contain more than 6,400 titles and over 1.25 billion articles—including more than 215 million obituaries.

Here is a list of the newspaper titles and date ranges that will be added from seven states: Illinois, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, and Virginia—plus the District of Columbia.

Every day we add more newspapers to GenealogyBank’s online newspaper archives, updating our coverage for more than 3,000 newspapers.

Rain, snow, it doesn’t matter—we digitize and post daily papers published today across America, as well as newspapers published 300 years ago. Millions of records are added every month to our archives.

We add new titles and expand the date ranges of newspapers already in our collection.

When we add a back run of a newspaper we may not yet have tracked down every issue ever published by that newspaper. However, we digitize and put online all the issues we can find, while continuing to track back issues with the goal of someday getting every possible issue online.

Here is just a partial list of what we have been working on in the past few weeks. I think it will give you a sense of the enormous scale of the service that GenealogyBank is bringing to genealogists online. Notice that we found one more issue of the Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, Georgia) and over 1,500 issues of the American & Commercial Daily Advertiser (Baltimore, Maryland): as we find back issues we digitize and index them, then put them online.

GenealogyBank adds more records to several thousand newspapers every day to provide you with enhanced coverage for your family research. Our next batch of current newspaper additions will span across the U.S., from California to Washington, D.C., including some recent newspapers from the heartland in Iowa and South Dakota.

Patriot (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), 29 July 1919, page 2

This round of expansion, we’ll be adding many more recent obituaries and death notices to help you discover more about your ancestors. Here are just a few of the new newspapers that we are adding to our archives from 11 states:

If your ancestors fought in the Mexican-American War (1846-48), then old newspapers are a great way to find records about them. Especially helpful are the troop and casualty lists many newspapers published during the war that can be found in our historical archives.

Newspapers routinely reported on our soldiers, as in this article from an 1847 newspaper.

Charleston Courier (Charleston, South Carolina), 24 June 1847, page 2

In this old newspaper article we read about the Palmetto Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers, which was encamped “near Jalapa, Mexico” during the Mexican-American War. This report provides troop strength totals and a military casualty list giving the names of the dead, the sick and the deserters.

Charleston Courier (Charleston, South Carolina), 24 June 1847, page 2

This news report also gives a status update noting that the South Carolina soldiers were most recently on a reconnaissance mission to Alvarado and were not involved in the Battle of Cerro Gordo. At this important American victory General Winfield Scott, though outnumbered by the Mexican troops, caught Mexican General Santa Anna so totally by surprise that he had to flee—without his artificial leg! That prosthetic limb was confiscated and is still on display at the Illinois State Military Museum.

The New Orleans Picayune reported the captured trophy of Santa Anna’s cork leg in an 1847 newspaper article reprinted by the Alexandria Gazette.

Alexandria Gazette (Alexandria, Virginia), 3 June 1847, page 2

Dig into GenealogyBank’s online historical newspaper archives today to find out more about your Mexican-American War military ancestors and discover the legendary stories of our country’s colorful history.

GenealogyBank has added the backfiles of more than 100 newspapers from 28 U.S. states! This is great news for genealogists—so start searching now.

Every day we work to fill in missing issues in our newspaper archives of more than 6,100 titles so that you can do deeper genealogy research. Thousands of newspaper pages were added in this latest addition, totaling more than 25 million articles to help you fill in the gaps on your family tree.

Five newspapers (marked with an asterisk in the table below) are titles new to GenealogyBank.

These new titles include one newspaper from Florida and four from Georgia:

Plant City Observer (Plant City, Florida)

Fayette Chronicle (Fayetteville, Georgia)

Fayette County News (Fayette, Georgia)

Today in Peachtree City (Fayetteville, Georgia)

East Coweta Journal (Senoia, Georgia)

Here is the complete list of our latest newspaper additions. Each title is an interactive link taking you directly to that newspaper’s search form.